Blogging in the Classroom

It has been a while since I posted information here. I have been busy helping set up a webcast series called Parents as Partners. A webcast specifically for for parents and teachers at www.ourschool.ca and edtechtalk.com. It has been enlightening working with a group of committed volunteer webcasters. I signed up for webcastacademy.net to increase my knowledge of podcasting, videocasting, and live webcasts. I was so excited to see so many good ideas and a repertoire of screencasts, articles and a chat world of Skypers standing ready to pick up the slack when my inexperience or exuberance got the best of me. Although I knew a few things about making a podcast, the wealth of information overwhelmed me but at the same time challenged me to try new things. Ustreaming, webcasting, wiki spaces, voice thread and twitter became part of my vocabulary. It has been a big learning curve and I decided to write this post to help parents and teachers take advantage of these tools to improve communications and hopefully build effective partnerships.

One of the barriers to effective partnerships is little and poor communications. There is great potential for technology to facilitate communications and offer learning experiences for every one. But there are a lot of questions to be answered before structures can be put into place.

Who is in charge? What can be said ? What applications should be used?
Who will pay? what training is necessary? What security and protections are necessary? Who will take care of everything? I went through the process of addressing these questions, searching for answers, connecting with those people who were currently using good communication practices and finding solutions so I thought I would record my experiences and the solutions I found worked.

Who is in charge? What can be said?

If you start out with the approach that this is a joint effort, then the team is in charge. Some people equate being in charge as having the power to spread information regardless of the content. Although that certainly may seem to give an advantage or position of power, if communications do not respect the members of the team, the ensuing conversations will work against the team achieving the intended goal. In this case, making good things happen for children. All good efforts to use technology are wasted if the intent of sharing ideas and working together is to assume a platform that is intended on attacking and embarrassing individuals. I’ve seen parents and teachers assume the power position, misuse the communications to escalate and inflame communities and people suffer as a result. While working on the Student Learning a Parent Focus parent involvement program, I came across a Handbook produced by the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education and this section has good information about facilitating discussions.

What applications should be used? Who will pay? What training is necessary?

There are numerous free web based software applications available for parents and teachers to access. If you have a computer and access to the internet you can be up and running with a web page in a matter of minutes and the only fees are your internet service provider charges. The training part is covered here in some of the screencasts and the help and FAQ sections for the applications you are using.

The tools I am going to identify can be used freely and by most people so there is the freedom to do what you want when you want.
These 4 are my favourite free tools.
Blogger.com - can be used as your own website. Refer to this section
ustream Live broadcasting application with chat function.
wikispaces. use to create a shared web site
Skype Free Voice over protocol services. Free telephone calls on the internet. You can have a free conference call for up to 9 participants - computer to computer voice calls.

Some school Boards offer internet services for teachers to use to connect with their students. Some teachers are using the same services to communicate to parents. But the norm is that there is no time or money allocated to developing online communication resources and on top of that there is the fear factor I talk about in this post

Here is an example of a Blogger.com web page created by Matt Montagne a teacher at the University School of Milwuakee.
Two examples of teacher wiki’s for parents http://parentworkshop.wikispaces.com/ and http://mstechnology.wikispaces.com/Parent+Ed
A parent workshop presented on ustream

I am still in the process of making screen casts to explain how to set up and use a wiki as well as ustream. This a simple video to explain wikis

and here is a video about twitter.com

For 25 years, Gary Stager, an internationally recognized educator, speaker and consultant, has helped learners of all ages on six continents embrace the power of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. He led professional development in the world’s first laptop schools (1990), has designed online graduate school programs since the mid-90s and is a collaborator in the MIT Media Lab’s Future of Learning Group. Mr. Stager’s doctoral research involved the creation a high-tech alternative learning environment for incarcerated at-risk teens. Recent work includes teaching and mentoring some of Australia’s “most troubled” public schools. Gary is Senior Editor of District Administration Magazine, Editor of The Pulse: Education’s Place for Debate, Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and an Associate of the Thornburg Center for Professional Development. Dr. Stager is also the Executive Director of The Constructivist Consortium. In 1999, Converge Magazine named Gary a “shaper of our future and inventor of our destiny.” The National School Boards Association recognized Dr. Stager with the distinction of “20 Leaders to Watch” in 2007.
Gary is presenting a workshop at the Science Academy Leadership Conference in Philadelpia January 25 - 27, 2008

As an intern in the class of 2.4 of Webcast Academy, I have entered a new world that I only dreamed about in 2001. Seven years ago I worked with educators, ICT experts and parents chairing a working group as part of the Ontario Knowledge Network for Learning - a Ontario Ministry of Education initiative. I was excited to join in the development of recommendations for strategic directions on ICT in education. My role was specific to recommendations to connecting parents and the community to the classroom using information and communication technology. Broadband has caught up to the recommendations and the dust is off the cover. Kudos to the Classroom teachers who have now embraced Web 2.0 technologies and taken the lead on creating learning environment for students of the 21st century.

Strong leadership from people like Jeff Lebow, Pam Shoemaker, Derrall Garrison at Webcast Academy have made me an avid student. They have given me the tools to I needed to revisit the use of information communication technology to connect parents to the classroom. Presentations for Parent as Partners such as “From a Principal’s perspective”, an interview with Dan Trainor, Canadian Principal of the year 2007, was created as result.

Podcasts are becoming common place but the instructions for recording two way Skype calls simplified the process and made the SkypeOut interview easy to create. It gets better. Teachers now have the tools needed to broadcast live and take their students and classrooms to the global stage.

Alex Couros from the University of Regina has prepared an excellent tutorial on how to use Skype, Ustream and Camtwist to Broadcast live.

Its hot of the press and there is lots to do.

Everyday more and more teachers have exciting tools at their finger tips ready to make learning global and easy. Alex Couros demonstrates to folks around the world what is in store for students and classrooms of the 21st century. As if kids had all the fun. Alex did a test drive of a skype conference and Ustream broadcast. Twitting volunteers to join in. This is a screen cast of Alex streaming live (using Snapzpro and my Mac Book Pro). There is no audio as the volume was turned down to stop echo in the skype conference. Alex Couros used Ustream to broadcast and Camtwist (Mac) for the visual effects and desktop demonstrations, Audio Jack and Soundflower to put the production together.

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